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A Note about My Mother
I’m a mamma’s boy. I won’t even try to pretend. Yet it’s a fractured, tense history between my mother and me. My girlfriend has interacted with my folks several times now. She asked me why I still have such intense and often negative feelings towards my mother. As is the case with nearly all narcissistic people, my mother is a charming human being. Especially to people who aren’t me. And even more so with women I’m dating. (Until recently it’s been a while in that department.)
I want to explain a few things. Because I truly, deeply love my mother. Always have, always will. But we do have a tragicomic past together, united by blood, DNA, family history, pain and trauma. More and more lately I’ve felt acutely ashamed when I cast judgment on my mom. It feels like I’m castigating her for no mortal reason; like I’m whipping someone who’s not only down but who’s been down for decades now. And yet it’s not for no reason. This being the case, the flip side is that my mom is and always has been a wonderful person and mother. Human beings are profoundly complex; our stories are usually layered, deep, nuanced, unexpected. My mom’s story is no different. I love her. I cherish her. She’s always been both my most sincere confidant and simultaneously my sharpest thorn.
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My mom was born in Eureka in 1950. Northern California rain and coastal fog. Her father—my grandpa Bill who passed away in 2015 at age 90—was a logger. Soon he and his wife (my mom’s mom) fled to Southern California, with my mom’s older brother and older sister in tow. They landed in Pacific Palisades, a middleclass community near Highway One.
On the outside, everything looked good. Big house. Money. Picket white fence; two-car garage. Church on Sundays. Dad worked at a plastics company and traveled for work a lot. Mom read books voraciously and was a feminist and loved to debate the merits or lack thereof and the patriarchal hierarchy of the Catholic church. My grandparents were high school sweethearts and could not be more different: She was intelligent, beautiful, cunning; he was soft, insecure, kind, open, like a big teddy bear.
My mom’s mom—my grandmother who I only met a few times in my vague, distant, blurry childhood—was trapped as a young mother in her early thirties. She wanted life experience; adventure. Her simpleton husband was gone often, and she was bored in the sexist 1950s and early 1960s. A housewife she was not. Think more of Joan Didion circa 1965. Whip-smart, lash-mean when she wanted to be, manipulative, tough. She didn’t want to be a mother. She didn’t want to be a wife…to my grandfather.
My mom was the youngest. Her older sister got pregnant junior year of high school and fled to go live with the boy’s family in Argentina and have the baby. (They’d met at Santa Monica High School.) Two years younger was my mom’s older brother—my uncle Pete. (My hero when I was a wild rock-n-roll rebel and alcoholic.) Around age fourteen my uncle moved out and lived with a good friend of his not far away, and then hitchhiked up to San Francisco to “tune in and drop out,” as well as dodge the Vietnam War in Southeast Asia.
That left my mother. Just her and her parents. Back in those days (mid-1960s) the priests would knock on locals’ doors and introduce themselves. When the local church got a new young, attractive priest with bleach-blond hair and striking blue eyes, and he knocked on my grandmother’s door, that was it. They fell for each other quickly, in little conversations over tea and coffee, when hubby wasn’t around. But my mom was around. She heard and saw it all.